January! Eight ways how great leaders kick-off a new year?

Dear Leader,

?It’s January. Time to kick off a new year with just the right balance of focus & inspiration for your team. It’s also time to communicate – What went well, what could have been better & what needs to be done differently in the next twelve months.

?So, what’s the best way to do that?

?As a student of leadership who’s observed good & bad leaders across six major industries in a dozen countries for over two decades, I would say that while?there is no straightforward formula to this & also that each leader has his / her own way to kick off a year in style (or mess it up gloriously), there are certain best practices that effective leaders follow & which seem to work. Here are some of them. Please feel free to borrow & adopt them to your situation if relevant.

• ?Ratings or Feedback?- A debate in most progressive organizations. One school of thought is that for meritocracy to be upheld, performance needs to be measurable & made to lead into carrots or sticks. The second school feels that?ratings are old fashioned, can encourage discrimination, dent (or inflate) self-images & make employees feel like objects. They support an informal feedback mechanism instead. So, what’s the right way? Having seen both models up close, I feel it needs to be both. An objective goal-sheet agreed upon at the start, one that needs to be followed through at mid-point & the finish line, benefits all parties. Feedback, on the other hand, need not have a defined rigor. A quick text or an email, a thank-you during a group call or a positive & proactive comment about someone to others. Because most of us need goal posts, true. But all of us need a word of encouragement under two circumstances – One, when we are doing well. And two, when we are not doing well. Make sure you pass personal feedback to your team members, not through a lifeless workflow, but in the old school way - with a real conversation.
• ?Celebrating the heroes?– The first rule to this is that you need to identify the?real?heroes & refrain from beating drums for linear numbers only. Make sure you get the apples vs oranges thing right (adjust for regional nuances, market challenges, regulatory candies, HQ proximity etc.). Once you have identified the true stars, treat them like royalty in front of the entire organization. Most importantly, when you celebrate your top performers,?do not?mention your mediocre runners (& definitely not your laggards) in the same communication. Bundling them together defeats the whole purpose & commodifies the team. Don’t be insecure about inciting spikes of envy or inviting a mutiny. Unless you make special people feel special, you’ll never sow the aspiration in others to become special too.
• ?Recognizing efforts that didn’t succeed?– It’s easy to get carried away by success & ignore genuine efforts that didn’t succeed. Bad leaders are guilty of this. So enamored are they with the?rainmakers -?the deal-fetchers & the revenue-earners of the past year, that they totally miss out the team members who put in a ton of sweat & blood in the year, but for some reason luck played hooky for them. Honest & hard-working employees?feel really terrible when they fail to contribute to the team. Their self-esteem takes a hit & they feel guilty after bad cycles. Make sure you spend quality?one-on-one?time with them. Listen in. Do not try to lecture or?‘motivate’ them. Hear their version why things didn’t work out. Most likely they’ll also have a bounce-back plan in mind, one that they are self-conscious to bring forth. Encourage that plan, ask them about their resource needs & give it to them. Make them feel respected when their chips are down & you’ll see the magic in the year ahead.
• ?Talking about your competition?– Shallow leaders are almost always internally-focused. Their new year messaging is mostly about themselves – how cool they are, what a great job the organization?(under them) has done in the past year & all the blah that comes with it. They avoid talking about competitors, partly because of their ignorance about market realities & partly also because they hate to acknowledge strengths of their rivals. But just because a pigeon closes its eyes, the cat doesn’t vanish. Bold leaders appreciate what their competitors have done right & what they could learn from that. They keep an eye not only on their Tier 1 challengers, but also the Tier 2 (who’re below them today) & the Tier 3 (who might become competition tomorrow) players. The embarrassing whacking that most large conglomerates are getting in the past two decades is primarily because of being a victim of Seneca’s version of ‘Anton’s Syndrome’, i.e., being blind & refusing to accept it.
• ?Kicking some as*?- The starting line for any new cycle is also the best time for pest control exercises & to smoke out non-performers. This might not be so straight forward and needs maturity & detachment by the leadership. Instead of being blinded by objective non-performance (lack of numbers) alone, good leaders weed out the subjective kind of pests – political creatures hiding in the layers, fat salespeople crouching behind fuzzy & immeasurable goalposts, bullies who demoralize the teams below them, and so on. Weak leaders are often shaky & lack the spine to deal with subjective mediocrity with a strong hand and soon their organizations get filled with social loafers – C & D players who bring down the group average. Go ahead and kick out some of these creatures & you can be sure that you’ll do wonders to the mojo of the rest of your team.
• ?Talking about your misses?– Tough leaders are self-aware people who’re never delusional about their turkeys. When you wrap a year & look back, you’ll obviously identify your missed shots & your screw-ups. Insecure leaders hide their failures & hence keep failing. Real badass leaders bring out their failures in the open & deconstruct them. They invite constructive feedback from their teams & chart out a plan to mitigate them.
• ?Defining your audacious goal(s) – Wimpish leaders start their cycles with ho-hum deployment meetings where a group of suits discuss the (irrelevant) aspects of the past, CFO-types spew some incomprehensible jargon dressed in a lot of unnecessary data & the team largely agrees on how to stretch the status quo by way of playing defense, cutting headcount or resorting to some financial jugglery. Rock Star leaders lay out one or two audacious targets, those which will turn the market on its head & take them miles ahead of competition. A path-breaking product, a game-changing channel, a daring new initiative with an A-Team that draws from best of the talent from within, so on. Unless you’re able to generate a frenzy in your team at the beginning of a cycle, you’ll never have an epic year.
• ?Sticking to agreed goal posts?– January is also a time to reflect. Make sure you pull out your communication from last January & conduct a?Say: Do?audit. Bad leaders often forget commitments, especially after good years. Nothing punctures the morale of a team more than a leader with a reset button, someone who fails to keep his / her share of the bargain after the spoils are collected. These leaders put off promotions by revising the narrative, ignore training needs of their teams because they’ve already delivered on expectations (so why spend more money?) & They follow the ‘If-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it’?rule, oblivious to the fact that the best time to fix anything is before it breaks. So, make sure you honor your commitments & stick to your pre-agreed goal posts. If you always think you can kid the kids, pretty soon the strong kids will desert you & you’ll be left to deal with the sharks alone.

?Yours Truly,

An Observer

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(This is an excerpt from a chapter of my 2023 book, 'Life as unusual - Work as usual'?, which made it to No. 2 rank on Amazon India in its category. You may check it out on Amazon in your country for a breezy weekend read or to gift it to a friend or a colleague)

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